I was listening to Peter Zehan talking about the impact of technology on manufacturing and farming. He said, in the US and probably only in the US the cost of modernizing and robotizing the manufacturing process and farming process can be amortized. The market is big enough and the farms are large enough to make large scale industrialization possible. He recounted the story of a shirt factory moved from China, where it employed hundreds of people at sewing machines to a fully automated US facility with two employees on staff at any time. One loaded bolts of cloth and the other managed software. The facility produced shirts at a fraction of the cost of producing in China.
As for agriculture, advances in AI and video meant a machine rolling over the rows of food could instantly assess the needs of each plant spraying with insecticide, or nutrients as required. Essentially industrial scale gardening.
The entire supply chain would be shorter and therefore cheaper. As is shipping to the final market.
When we evaluate a change, we do so assuming all else remains constant.
> I was listening to Peter Zehan ...
That right there was when you should have stopped ;-)